The night Arnold Schoenberg turned down an Oscar nomination

E. Randol Schoenberg, the composer’s grandson, has found a wonderful letter from the old man, declining a chance to introduce one of the Oscar winners in 1938. The winner in question was Charles Previn, for Best Original Music Score, One Hundred Men and a Girl

I deeply regret that illness during the past two nights will prevent me from attending the banquet tonight. Please express my disappointment and offer my apologies to your board and the guests. I add the remarks which I had planned to deliver and which I should like to have represent me on this important occasion.

It seems to me one of the most estimable traits of mankind, that men like to find out, who are their best. And, that mankind always is ready to venerate outstanding persons in every field, symbolizes to me the tendency of mankind toward progress, toward development, toward improvement, toward a better future.

As almost my whole life as an artist has been devoted–scarcely to the present,–but distinctly to the future, I use with pleasure this occasion to express the hope: there will soon come a time, when the severe conditions and laws of modernistic music will be no hindrance any more toward a reconciliation with the necessities of the moving picture industry.

By its use of music as a means of stimulation, the movie industry has already succeeded in making the people music conscious. Step by step it will educate them also to ideas and ways of expression, which they cannot appreciate today.
Because of this effect, in time to come, every outstanding man in this field will deserve the title of pioneer of culture.
Therefore I congratulate most heartily the man whose Universal Picture Company picture “One Hundred Men and a Girl” has been chosen by so great a majority of votes to be recognized as the author of this years best musical score.

Arnold Schoenberg

116 N. Rockingham Ave.
West Los Angeles.
Telephone: W.L.A. 35077

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Arnold has just gone up in my estimation 100%. There must have been nobody that year who was writing sentimental schlock with mawkish and sentimental lyrics. I don’t watch the tired spectacle of virtue-signalling which has become modern entertainment award ceremonies. Back in the days of the Freed Unit of MGM and the excellent music of the greats of American musical theatre in some pretty stunning film musicals the choices were obvious for prizewinners. Excellence was the order of the day. Talent abounded. Alas, not any more.

It should be noted that Previn won the award as head of the music department, not as the composer. This was apparently the norm for a time where the producer got the credit.

There were two new songs and the rest of the score were taken from classical music, some conducted by Stokowski, some uncredited. The works included Tchaikovsky’s 5th, Berlioz’s Rakoczy March, and Wagner’s Lohengrin. Far from looking forward, rather it emphasized already that only music a hundred years old mattered. The selection of almost century-old classics beat out new film scores from Steiner, Newman (2 films), and Disney’s multi-composer Snow White.

Feedback from this likely led to the change in 1939 where “original” actually had to mean that.

I felt a similar “huh?” from the Grammys in 1991, when “Unforgettable”, a song from the late 40s, won “best song” award which normally goes to the songwriters. It basically told 2 generations of songwriters that they’ll never be as good as the songs your grandparents listened to, so why bother? I felt it very insulting.

Well, I wasn’t expecting 12-tone (though it did come in the 50s with some scores from Rosenman, and even a bit of West Side Story)…I was just pointing out that “original score” meant something very different in 1938 to 1939 and today.

Had the rules of 1938 remained in place, Kubrick might have gotten an Oscar for score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Granted, not many knew that the works from Ligeti, or even the Strauss excerpt, were not made specifically for the film, but there we are).

And though we’re talking Schoenberg because of the context, 12-tone wasn’t the only composition style at the time, obviously. Korngold was about to give romanticism a shot in the arm in the film world that would never leave, while Disney’s composers, especially Frank Churchill, would remain influenced by impressionism (Debussy and Ravel) until the war changed the nature of the studio’s output. Copland was just about to hit his popularist peak, and neo-classicism was a movement with quite a lot of support.

My original post wasn’t meant to imply that film composers should have been 12-tone. It was simply a comment that an “original score” full of 50 to 100 year old classical works was deemed by the Academy to be the “best” among a field of contemporary film composers, thereby telling them (in parallel with the Grammies 55 years later) that their efforts would never be as good as the composers of the past.

In light of who won, and what that original score contained, Schoenberg’s intended comments have something a dark irony to them.

It turns out there were fourteen (!) nominees for Score that year. Anyone who lost had lots of company and probably didn’t lose any work over it.

I’m extremely doubtful that any lasting message was inflicted on Hollywood composers by this outcome. A perusal of Best Score winners over the years shows that many major talents would get their due for their original efforts.

I’ll also note that this was only the fourth year for the Score award. What made a great score was perhaps not as obvious then as it is now.

“A perusal of Best Score winners over the years shows that many major talents would get their due for their original efforts”

Which is pretty much what I said. There probably was some backlash over ‘original’ at the time, resulting in a change in the rules such that 1) the composer, not the producer, gets the award, and 2) it must be actually original, created for the film it was nominated for.

So no, it didn’t change the composers but it did change the awards.

Not the last time. Things change all the time in regard to feedback, such as how the Sound awards are divvied up (which makes no sense at all to an outsider).

It’s very weird to mention Arnold Schönberg and this other guy in one sentence. There is definitely no link. Because he was born in Wien it’s absolutely natural coming home after a very long time in cultural isolation…

Why mention this? Brentwood is a des res in LA. Schoenberg died in 1951, when Simpson was 4, so I doubt he had bought the property yet.

If you tried hard enough I daresay you could find all sorts of undesirables who had lived, at some time or another, in proximity to where some more admirable sort lived. It would take a peculiar sort of personality to make such associations, though.

You appear to be conflating the return of Schoenberg’s archive to Vienna with Simpson. I seriously doubt it ever entered anyone else’s mind.

The home that Simpson lived in was non-existent when Schoenberg was alive. There were very few homes on Rockingham, mostly vacant lots.

OLASSUS SAYS: “I have never been able to forgive the family for acquiescing in the relocation of Schönberg’s collection and archive from L.A. to Wien, an outrage”

In fact, the University of Southern California had decided that USC was not “getting their bang for the buck” as they indicated on BBC radio. They, in effect, evicted the family. Happily, it now flourished in Vienna celebrating its 20th year.

Sorry, Mr. Schoenberg, but the someone I was referring to was you. The family had a tough task thrown in its lap, but instead of slogging it out and securing a new home in Los Angeles, as civic pride would have dictated, the easy option was taken to send the material out of the United States in the knowledge it would be welcomed and safe.

Arnold Schönberg was born, raised, and grew as an intellectual and creative musician in Vienna. For all its warts, Vienna was the city that helped make Schönberg the creative force he was. That city and not so far away Berlin, where Schönberg later taught, remain more devoted to his music than any like centers in the USA. Schönberg was not the first great composer treated poorly by the political failings of Austria. Should we disallow museums devoted to Franz Schubert in Vienna because Clemens Metternich ran a police state that refused the impecunious Schubert the right to marry his young love? After all, the probable reason Schubert died at age 31 was his being weakened by venereal disease.

In a liberal democracy, under the rule of law, the sins of a guilty father are not to be visited upon his innocent sons and daughters. If such guilt could be so transferred, would not the American history of slavery disqualify our country as well from having a center devoted to Arnold Schönberg?

When I worked at the School of Performing Arts at the University of Southern California during the initial set-up of the Arnold Schoenberg Institut, the Berlin government gave $100,000 to equip the Institute building. Using the moral standard of OLASSUS, the entire run of that operation from inception in 1974 until USC gave its considerably enhanced collection to Vienna in 1996 would have been morally tainted.

Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center has a budget many times larger than USC ever provided, even in its heyday, and now, after some twenty years running, it does exemplary work advancing the life, legacy, and relevance of Arnold Schönberg to the world today.

Schönberg will remain relevant for research and understanding of what happened musically in the last century, and therefore it is of great importance that the Schönberg Centre remains in Vienna as a monument to its history and cultural relevance, and provides material which throws a light upon S’s works and life. Schönberg was and always remained a Viennese.

Sadly, there is a link between O.J. and Schoenberg. Ronald Schoenberg, the composer’s son, was the judge who ruled on Simpson’s 1989 spousal abuse charge (five years before the murders.) Despite the photos of beaten Nicole, Schoenberg ruled O.J. should serve no jail time.

No there isn’t. This is about a letter from Arnold Schönberg (he was one of the most important composers in the last century!) and not about a letter or anything from his son Ronald Schoenberg. Got it?

And lest you offer criticism of the plea bargain, remember that Nicole Simpson had reconciled with OJ and retracted her claim of abuse. The DA couldn’t even convict OJ when he murdered her. Just imagine what problems they would have had trying to convict him of spousal abuse.

The letter says that Schönberg hoped that through the developments of the genre, the movie theatre, the barriers that still hindered the understanding of progressive music (like his) would, at some stage in the future, be overcome, so that the public would finally begin to understand the real music of their own time (like his), and finally be allowed to share in the progress of the times, the REAL times. The whole thing merely reveals the progressivist thinking of Schönberg and the sad misunderstanding he suffered from concerning ‘the movie’. Obviously this ‘One hundred men and one girl’ is one of those sentimental dragons dragging ‘oldfashioned’ music in its wake, including a ‘Russian’ conductor who forgot his accent.

This little speech is actually a put-down of the Previn award, notice that he avoided even mentioning the winner’s name, and his references to the whole silly production in corporate terms. Its disdainful drift would have been rudely obvious in the day, that’s how educated people insulted one another. The headline was, My day will come.

And it did! Except that his style of composing was published and promoted in the movies to signify & enhance fright, creepiness, not-right-ness in general. And there, amongst the broad masses, it has remained.

Last year, I made a YouTube compilation for those who would prefer or find it necessary to have melodies to hum with or whistle (with tongue in cheek) to the works of Arnold Schoenberg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFD46uUQwGM

Indeed, it may show a true understanding of Schoenberg’s achievements. Or at least: an alternative opinion to received wisdom which has accepted the theories of S and his circle as orthodoxy.

One can still have the greatest respect and admiration for S’s wide-ranging imagination and intelligence, and still object to the tragic developments in his thinking and composing. I believe he stopped being a composer of genius with opus 23 and everything that followed, and there are good arguments for it. The awful and misconceived convention to call S and his two pupils the ‘Second Viennese School’, in an attempt to give their works an academic aura, says it all. S was, in a deep sense, a traditionalist composer, longing for the greatness of Beethoven’s and Brahms’ music, but being captured by the 19C scientific belief of ‘progress’. He had the talent to restructure the tonal tradition to his own personal taste, as his 1st Chamber Symphony demonstrates, but his intellect – infected with progressiveness – would not let him. His tragedy is not better expressed than in the 2nd piece of the Fuenf Orchesterstuecke: ‘Vergangenes’. What he ironically called ‘die blumenreiche Romantik’ was the locus of his real artistic soul, that is why he could weep over it so eloquently:

It is not difficult to ‘back them up’. First, there is the aural experience of small snippets that circulate within a static field and that don’t make sense; second: there is a serious theoretical problem with the idea of the chromatic, equalized field (with practical problems as a result): it is a physical fact that different intervals have different wave ratios which are immediately perceivable by the human ear (the art of piano tuning is based upon this practical fact). Hence the conflict between Schoenberg’s and Berg’s musical intentions and the frustrations of these intentions created by the confines of ‘the system’. In Schoenberg’s ‘free atonal period’ the dissonances do work because the style is referring all the time to the symphonic repertoire it descends from, and they are not hindered; hence the effective expressivity of most of these pieces. The 12-tone system freezed all of that. In the orchestral Variations the problem is obvious: gestures from the earlier symphonic repertoire battle against entirely artificial constraints and the effect is some ‘lava’ of static despair. It is all explained (among other things) in this book, chapters 2 & 3:

During his years in Los Angeles, Schoenberg barely eked out a living. LA was just the destination for many intellectuals fleeing Hitler, and AS always seemed an odd fit there. Most of his greatest music was not written there, and by the time the collection was taken and moved to Vienna, he was a mostly forgotten footnote in LA. I lived in Los Angeles during those years and remember not being surprised.

That said, Vienna seems like a much more fitting repository for this collection.

Of these, the Kol Nidre, the Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw are the best, in spite of the 12-tones system – which he had not needed anyway.

The 2nd Chamber Symphony was begun immediately after the 1st one, somewhere in 1907, but left unfinished. In the thirties he took it up again, in a mood of nostalgia, as he explained in an interview at that time: he always regretted that he had not developed that style further because he felt there still were many possibilities there to be explored. But the 2nd lacks the ease and the inspiration of the 1st, in my opinion.

Schoenberg was my main subject in my Cambridge days, studying with Alexander Goehr, the son of Walter Goehr who was a personal friend of Schoenberg. A. Goehr was (is) a Schoenberg expert, growing-up with Schoenberg’s music, his ethos and theories, and introducing modernism in England in the sixties and seventies. A. Goehr’s thinking was very close to Schoenberg’s as there obviously was a deep affinity, which could be traced in Schoenberg’s writings. Naturally, A. Goehr’s musical thinking (he is also a composer) suffered from the same type of flaws as Schoenberg’s, so: studying the subject’s material with someone who represented that line of thinking and had been so close to the sources and mentality, offered the best possible understanding of what inspired and what hindered the great (Viennese) man.

As for the 2nd Chamber Symphony: this interview quote can be found in: ‘Arnold Schoenberg; oder der konservative Revolutionaer’, by Willi Reich, published by Verlag Fritz Molden, Wien,1968, page 307. The interview was a written one by German psychologist Dr Julius Bahle in 1931.

John Borstlap, let me know when you’ve actually listened to all of the Schoenberg works you insist on judging. Your music has changed over the years and I am sure your ear has too. You might want to listen again if you haven’t in a while. I went to your website and was enjoying your music . . . almost as much as the works you were trying to imitate. http://johnborstlap.com/audio/

If you had listened carefully enough, you could have noticed Schoenberg’s influence in the ‘Sinfonia’ fragment, and also the clear differences with stylistic models (which ones? there are no clear models). Critique and admiration can go together, concerning different works. And yes, I listened to most of the works you mentioned, but I am as stubborn in my views as AS was, and more practical.

It seems that an account of what I’m seeking is to found in Brendan Carroll’s 1997 bio “The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold” (464pp), currently the hegemonic biography. A reviewer (on AZ) says:

“Korngold never forgot that the cerebral element in music could never take the place of the emotional. For example, his friendly but deadly serious battles over atonality and serial compositions with Arnold Schoenberg are key to understanding Korngold’s philosophy of composition and are well treated in Carroll’s book.”

I assume these are in written form, or mainly so.

(I think I recall that a revised & expanded edition is out this year, but I can’t find any evidence of it.).

A fascinating letter, and an important document showing Schoenberg’s thinking. There is the historicist view upon music history: the developments in music history are seen as developing from simple (‘lower’) to more complex (‘higher’), a view which stems from biology and science. In reality, sometimes a musical language developed from complex to simple (16C polyphony to 17C monody: the Florentine Camerata, Monteverdi’s Seconda Prattica; the transition from complex baroque towards simple Empfindsamkeit and Viennese classicism in the 18th century). According to S, elements which ‘survived’ did so because they were ‘stronger’: a darwinian vision, entirely inappropriate in the arts.

Then S explains that his understanding of dissonance is historicist as well: in earlier (medieval) times, people found thirds and sixths dissonant, and later they were ’emancipated’ to consonances. After a period of getting used to what is experienced as dissonances, they turn into consonances. Of course acculturation is an important factor. But ‘a dissonant’ is not a thing that can be emancipated, since it acquires its musical meaning only within a stylistic context: what works as a dissonance in one style, can be experienced as a colouring in another. We still hear dissonances in Bach as dissonances, otherwise that music would be entirely incomprehensible; but the same tone combinations in Debussy work not as dissonances but as colourings. Schoenberg saw ‘dissonance’ as a scientific, materialistic ‘thing’ instead of a relationship and that explains his idea that in the end, one could simply cancel dissonance and treat every tone combination as a consonance.

Julius Korngold – father of Erich Korngold – was the most important music critic in early 20C Vienna, and not simply a ‘narrow-minded conservative’. He championed Mahler’s music at a time when Mahler was considered a dangerous modernist. Nonetheless, Korngold represented the classicist attitude in Vienna, fruit of 19C Bildungsbuergertum, the educated bourgeois classes, for whom culture and classicism were symbols of civilization and cohesion. His critique of Schoenberg was motivated by his sense that such developments would, in the end, destroy classical music as it flourished at the time.

The mythology around Schoenberg and his two pupils as the heroes of progress used a simplistic accusation of ‘conservatism’ of early 20C Viennese music life to create an aureole over the martyr’s head, and that was a defense reaction. People were anxious at the time that their precious musical tradition would go under, as the political context soon was to sink suddenly and with dramatic consequences.

Meanwhile the Viennese three – with Mahler thrown-in as a John the Baptist – have become established orthodoxy with its own, appropriately nonsensical monument:

From the archives

From the archives

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